2019 Master Farmer Bill Sahs:  Building Better Lives

[March 07, 2019]    Growing up on the family farm in Logan county, 2019 Master Farmer Bill Sahs didn’t live the average farm kid story.

After his father died of cancer at just 37, Bill’s mother married the farmer next door, who’d recently lost his wife to cancer. His next-door neighbors became his step brothers, and he grew up in the expanded household. After high school, he joined the Navy and met and married his wife, Barb, in Iowa.

By 1976, Barb and Bill were able to move back to Illinois, farming 200 acres for a neighbor. They added more ground but the real watershed moment came in 2005 when he got to farm the ground his father and grandfather farmed – 50 years later.

The first pass? “It was like going back, almost,” Bill says.

Over time, Bill has changed his farming practices from conventional tillage to minimum till and no-till (and tried strip till along the way), and he uses filter strips and CRP to reduce soil erosion on farms with ditches and creeks. He uses autosteer and variable-rate applies limestone and fertilizer, and soil tests according to GPS. He also started growing pumpkins on contract for Libby two years ago.

“What I like about farming is that you’re your own boss,” he says. “You get to do every day what you love.”
Bill and Barb work together, making use of Barb’s accounting background to track, generate and analyze production records.

Their son Andy lives with them and is disabled, and he gets trucks ready in the fall.

Daughter Kelly is part of a young military family in Texas.

Bill co-founded Logan County Habitat for Humanity, and serves on the hospital, farm bureau, elevator, church, county and health boards. He says, “I hope my legacy will be of giving back.”

Bill was nominated by neighboring farmer Jeff Elsas.

[Holly Spangler, Prairie Farmer Editor]